Miklos Legrady
Derrida’s method of deconstruction was to look past the irony and ambiguity to the layer of contradictions that genuinely threaten to collapse that system. This is the model we aim to follow, although some irony is unavoidable.
Now that Trump signed tariffs into law, perhaps creating the 2nd Great Depression, we need to look at how dishonesty and denial in the arts may have changed cultural behavior that led to MAGA Republicans and Dishonest Donald Trump. Peer review obviously occurs as the familiar judgment of individuals, but there’s also the cumulative effect of public opinion that establishes the cultural canon. This study highlights how an accumulation of errors and failing peer reviews, due to vested interests, may have made of postmodernism the post-truth era in arts and in politics. Jane Heap wrote of the 1922 Independent Armory show in the same year’s Winter edition of the Little Review. She said “The modern artist must understand group force; he cannot advance without it in a democracy.” But art truly became institutionalized in the 1960s
Once upon a time, in a place far, far away, there lived a man named Robert Storr, who was a curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. At a 1969 Dia symposium, he said that in the 1960s the art world moved from the Cedar Tavern to the seminar room. Is there a problem? Yes. Art is non-verbal while seminars feast on discussion. The arts consist, among other modes, of body language, whose formal aspect is dance; audio or acoustic language, whose formal aspect is music; visual language, where a picture is worth a thousand words, and there’s the art of literature. Even in literature the sonority, pitch, rhythm and tempo of words are the poetry of language. These qualities differentiate literature from text which is the verbal or written form of conscious thought. Non-verbal languages express that which cannot be said in words.
But there is a greater problem. The art history and theory, that we learned in school and teach our students, is dramatically contradicted by the actual art history, the period documents, as well as the nonsense and failure of logic we allowed vested interests to embed in the cultural canon to promote their own agenda. This got so bad over three or four decades that Kitty Scott, a curator at the National Gallery of Canada, wrote on Facebook a few years ago that no one knows what art is anymore. Great! (irony) Every other profession knows what they are doing! Shouldn’t we try to find out?
Far too often our academic peer review promotes a homogeneity that counters the purpose of higher education. A higher degree such as a Master’s or Doctorate means that you are questioning the state of existing knowledge, the very fabric of what you have already learned. Here we face a warning by R.A. Fisher, founder of modern statistics. In 1947 he was invited by the BBC to talk about science; his words also apply to the arts.
“A scientific career is peculiar in some ways. Its reason d’être is an increase in natural knowledge and on occasion an increase in natural knowledge does occur. But this is tactless and feelings are hurt. For in some small degree it is inevitable that views previously expounded are shown to be either obsolete or false. Most people, I think, can recognize this and take it in good part if what they have been teaching for ten years or so needs a little revision, but some will undoubtedly take it hard, as a blow to their amour propre, or even an invasion of the territory they have come to think of as exclusively their own, and they react with the same ferocity as any animal whose territory is fought over. I do not think anything can be done about it … but a young scientist may be warned and even advised that when one has a jewel to offer for the enrichment of humankind some people will clearly wish to tear that fellow to shreds.”
We need to know what drives this system.. Joseph Beuys strategically based his entire career around a series of lies about his being shot down as a pilot during WW2, and being rescued by villagers who wrapped him in fat and felt. Asked why he made up this story, he replied that the German people needed myths. Everyone wants heroes, people need myths.
Walter Benjamin was a lyrical writer. But if you google Benjamin, you will read about a social scientist, an early Marshall McLuhan, who was so prescient he could accurately predict how people in the future would look on art and society. Well, time has been very unkind to Walter Benjamin, as everything he wrote in his 1935 The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction was mistaken.
He was writing Marxist Propaganda, since then disproved. Benjamin’s core argument is “that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art”, aura referring to the spiritual and emotional effect and effectiveness of art. These supposedly vanish when a work of art is reproduced. However, our knowledge of art mostly comes from books, books are made by mechanical reproduction yet the power of art and literature is enhanced when reproduction makes the artist or author’s work available to a growing audience. The aura of a work of art is enhanced through mechanical reproduction. Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” is a symphony of Marxist propaganda, errors and contradictions. But for nine decades not one person stood up to point this out and correct this misinformation.
In the1960s, Sol Lewitt was one of the fathers of Conceptual art, a hero whose Sentences and Paragraphs on Conceptual Art were published in Artforum. Lewitt was a talented visual artist but his Statements and Paragraphs were often questionable. For example, in his opening Paragraphs we read that in Conceptual Art, the idea is dominant; “all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair.
The person who proved Sol Lewitt was wrong beyond the shadow of a doubt was, of course, Sol Lewitt himself, when he was deeply disappointed in perfunctory executions of his own work. He eventually realized that everyone has ideas, but few have ability, which tells us it is the execution which turns an idea into a work of art. But he never revised his writing, it had been published in Artforum, so we didn’t find this out till a few years ago, in 2019, when Larry Bloom published Sol Lewitt’s biography. For fifty years Sol Lewitt was one of the artists who turned Postmodernism into the Post Truth movement. Today’s students and teachers still insist art is about the idea, they read it in Artforum.
Everyone assumes that Marcel Duchamp had a deep, deep understanding of art. Everyone believed this except for those who actually studied Marcel Duchamp without kissing the ring. They realized to their horror that Duchamp had very little understanding of art. No one who does would have said the things that Duchamp did. What did Duchamp say? We will find out in a minute, but first we have to ask why then was Duchamp believed to be so smart?
We often read that Duchamp was not really influenced by DADA, or that Duchamp was a great jester. This is usually followed by statements of his work being enigmatic, shocking,, outside conventional expectations,, difficult to assimilate, disconcerting. But we do have an Occam’s Razor that dispels such problems and makes Duchamp’s work readily accessible. Duchamp said something that smacked of DADA. He gave us an insight that sweeps away all ambiguity, so that all his work becomes obvious and easy to understand. Duchamp said he wanted to get rid of art, that it was discredited. Unfortunately this is unacceptable since no one who knows anything about art would say such a thing. Since Duchamp is supposedly a genius, such statements are therefore enigmatic and we twist ourselves into pretzels explaining his words in ways that make Duchamp seem brilliant. But if we simply accept that he was a Dadaist who said things to shock the bourgeoisie, the ambiguity disappears, but we run afoul of the gatekeepers who protect our myths, the status quo.
Duchamp success was encouraged by self-confidence and self-worth, having grown up in a financially secure and culturally enriched environment. His father was a wealthy lawyer and his siblings were also artists. He also possessed a genuine talent in visual art, which reached its apogee with his painting Nude Descending a Staircase, which won him national acclaim when shown in New York at the1913 Armory show. And then he quit painting.
Why this preamble? Over time this author published, commentaries on nonsensical statements and ridiculous assumptions by talented and reputed postmodern artists like Walter Benjamin, Marcel Duchamp, Sol Lewitt, and others. Artists who made truly great art but whose intellectual understanding of their field lacked the same acuity as their intuitive creative process. Yes, such a statement offends the gatekeepers. Authority is the enemy of scholarship.
The creative functions use a non-verbal language, a different toolkit and mental functions than intellectual processes. Art expresses what we cannot put into words, and sometimes those who are great at the one are terrible at the other. Thus a great dancer may be terrible at math, a great artist like Modigliani or Henri Rousseau might not possess a powerful intellect.
It happens quite often that an artists’ work brings them a credibility that mistakenly extends to everything they say; we expect an accomplished person to have a deep understanding of their work, and so their statements are accepted without question, leading to dubious consequences. Sometimes the gatekeepers are enamored of the artist’s work, so forgive their perceptual errors. There are also gatekeepers who reach their position not through talent and ability but through their social skills at climbing the academic ladder.
A Dismal Failure of Peer Review, Part 2 , will be in the July/August issue
